Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Should Dutch Christians Call God Allah? News from Religion in a Post-Christian World
If you have not heard about this little event in the Dutch town of Breda, read about it here:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1186557468267&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Now the easiest answer to this is simply to call this man a fool, a tool of pluralism, and dismiss what he is doing. Trust me, that is very tempting. But there are deeper theological, linguistic, cultural, and apologetic issues at play, ones that I doubt our dear Bishop Muskens has not really thought about.
First off, let us deal with the linguistic/semantic issues. The Bishop is quite right. In many Christian communities in the Arab world the word used for God is Allah. And remember, these communities predate Islam by centuries. The word Allah, semantically at least, means God. When the Bishop worked in Indonesia it is quite possible that the Christian community, even in a non-Arabic speaking country, might have chosen Allah as the name for the God of the Christian Bible because a) it avoids semantic linking to pagan deities and b) it is the most common word for them to use.
Missionaries, ministers, and translators of the Bible always struggle with the meaning of words. In the otherwise atrocious film, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, the translator learns only too late that the word for God they have chosen is the destroyer, not the God of mercy, of love, and of justice.
By adopting words in current usage in a culture Christianity may be more easily explained to the native population. So, often words for God are chosen from the existing culture. However the danger then becomes one of syncretism. If, for example, an Animist of Africa is told about God using their word for the deities of their village, and accepts in the process the work of Christ on his behalf (please no emails about the meaning of salvation – its an example), then are we sure that he has made a change of loyalties to the Triune God of the Bible, or as the work of Christ been merely subsumed into the work of the existing deity structure? Tough work, and I respect missionaries who have worked through the ages to take on this challenge.
So, Bishop Markens is on relatively solid linguistic grounds, but there is the cultural issue which is tied to the linguistic. Had Bishop Markens not noticed that the average Dutch DOESN’T SPEAK ARABIC? The Dutch already have their word for God. The Muslim population has theirs. One day, sooner rather than later perhaps, the majority of the population may speak Arabic and it will supplant all other languages as the official language. In that case, then God will probably be spoken of using Allah.
But on the cultural side, the Bishop is making several important mistakes. First, he is communicating to the people of Islam that the Dutch have surrendered to Islam. You can debate about whether Islam is a religion of peace (most Muslims I know certainly are people of peace), but it is most definitely a religion of evangelism. In regions where the faith did not conquer (as it did in North Africa and the Middle East), it used trade to evangelise (like India, Indonesia, southern Africa and Mindanao). Islam expects to be the dominant faith one day (as does Christianity), and where it is the majority faith, at least historically, the non-Muslim population has suffered under great inequity. So, by telling the people of the Netherlands to call God Allah, the Bishop is communicating to the Muslims that there is now the dominant culture. Is this really what the progressive minded folks of that great country want to say?
But secondly, what the Bishop is saying, and remember that the Bishop’s job in the Roman Catholic faith is the evangelise the populace, and re-evangelise lapsed Catholics, is that pluralism is more important than anything else. The reason to call God Allah in his mind is so not to offend Muslims? So, should we not then ask for Muslims to never refer to non-Muslims as kuffar (infidels)? Should we not ask them to denounce all statements that are anti-Semitic and anti-Hindu (who are often called idol worshippers in the Muslim press)? Of course he doesn’t ask for the concessions. That is because the cultural state of the old European West is one of complete shame, where pluralism means honouring the new, the immigrant, the non-traditional, and always assuming the worst about one’s own traditions and culture. Since Muslims do not make of the majority of Dutch, would it not be equally valid to make all Muslims when they refer to Jesus (a great prophet in Islam) as Issa al Meshiah (Jesus the Messiah)? After all, we would not want our Muslim neighbours to offend their Christian neighbours would we?
Third and finally, let us turn to the issues of theology and apologetics. The root question ultimately is not one of linguistics (a rose by any other name, as Bart points out, if we called them stinkweeds they would probably not be so popular), or of culture. It is a theological and apologetic issue.
Is the God that Muslims worship – under the name Allah – the same as the Father of Jesus Christ? It is not the words that matter, but the content of the words, the character of the being who we address with that word “God.” After all, in our country people will say such things as “Tom Brady is God” but they clearly are not saying the content of that word is the same as when I say “Jesus Christ is God.”
Allah, the God of Islam, is a monad – a solitary and totally other being. He has no son and no spirit. In Christianity the God we know and love is the Triune God – who exists perpetually and eternally as Father, Son and Spirit, each of which is fully God but of which we can say that were any of the three cease to be, God as we know God would not be the same (sorry, not the place to discuss Trinitarian theology, look elsewhere on this site for that). The Triune God of the Christian faith is One, but also relational, and it both totally separate from creation (he created it), as opposed to pantheism and panentheism, and at the same time intimately involved in its day to day reality. He is both imminent and transcendent. So, just on the surface, by definitions, we are talking about two radically different views of God. Some would also point to the fact that although there are 99 names of God in Islam, none are Love, while the New Testament states that God is Love (I believe this is not that big a difference, as many of the name of Allah in Islam imply his loving care).
There are other important differences. Muslims believe that all things happen by Allah’s will. This leads to a form of fatalism which is common also in Hinduism and Buddhism. I will never forget reading some of the public sermons in the days after the South Asian Tsunami given by Imams who stressed the tsunami was God’s will, and that they were being punished for not being good Muslims. Yes, I know, we had Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell say something on that order after 9/11 but there is a big difference. Christians do not ascribe all acts of evil to God’s active will (there are instances, such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis that do fall into this pattern), but more often, disasters are seen as either the consequence of living in a fallen world (the Fall being our fault as human beings and affecting all of creation) or the outcome of God removing his protective hand and allowing evil things to happen either because we desire it, or we have set in motion the events, or because…well, the question of evil for Christians is a difficult one.
The outcome of evil for the other faiths ends up being a) it is God’s particular will or b) that it is not really evil and we must deny such categories (as in world denying faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism). As Christians (and here I would include most streams of Judaism) we must try and understand the will of God, but we also may turn to him in sorrow, in brokenness and know that God weeps for the fallen. As I understand it, many Muslims in the area hardest hit by the tsunami are for the first time questioning their faith and wondering whether or not the person of Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible Triune God, does not offer more hope in both this life and the next.
So the content of the name Allah vs. the Christian God is not the same. Yes, there are some overlaps, but there are clear distinctions. This raises the apologetic question. How do we communicate our faith in a way that respects where people (in this case Muslims) are today, while encouraging them to seek and understand the message of the Gospel? For many Muslims the Christian God is falsely understood, and our God has become understood as some doddering old fool who won’t hold his people accountable. This of course is not the God I worship, but that is what most Muslims think of most Christians. So, there may be good apologetic reason to use Allah, to help make the point that the God we seek (or rather are sought by) as Christians is the same God that Muslims seek – he is Holy and Great.
But the tension is to now add into that content of God the elements of the Christian faith that are different than Islam – God’s relational nature, God’s mercy, God’s imminence with us. And so, the real issue apologetically is not so much “Allah” but the name by which Christians enter into faith with God – Jesus of Nazareth. We can build off of all the good things that the Koran says about Issa – that he was a prophet and sinless. But here we must ultimately take people to see the full content of Jesus as revealed to us in the New Testament. It is then through the person of Jesus that the vast differences between the God of Islam and the Triune God of Christianity can and should be communicated. Once Jesus is understood as we known him, then the content between an Islamic “Allah” and a Christian “Allah” are made clear.
But of course, all this takes time and takes understanding, and did not make the news stories about poor Bishop Merken. In Phillip Jenkins very solid (if a bit academic) book God’s Continent, he makes the point that part of the decline in the Christian faith in Europe is due to the lack of new more energetic forms of the Christian faith and of the protection afforded by government to state sponsored faiths. But there is also this. When the institutional voices – the seminaries, the leaders, the bishops and the ministers – stop believing that their message really has the ability to change both people’s and communities lives, it ultimately comes about “getting along.” Bishop Merken is not an evil man. But I would doubt that he still believes in categories like good and evil. Most Dutch don’t. But I can tell you that many of the Muslims living there do – and I will let you guess what they think of Bishop Merken.
